


buy a dog

by panharmonium



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types
Genre: AU
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-05-28
Updated: 2015-05-28
Packaged: 2018-04-01 14:30:55
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,487
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4023424
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/panharmonium/pseuds/panharmonium
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>You ask of my companions. Hills, sir, and the sundown, and a dog as large as myself that my father bought me. They are better than human beings, because they know but do not tell.  -Dickinson</p>
            </blockquote>





	buy a dog

**Author's Note:**

  * For [snicklefritz](https://archiveofourown.org/users/snicklefritz/gifts).



> A completely non-canonical story set in the Star Wars Awkward AU-verse. Credit for everything in here goes to snicklefritz, and especially for Dog. He is not mine. I am just taking him out for a walk. <3

                                                                                                                  i.  
  
In the beginning, there had been just the one human, who Dog had liked well enough.  
  
That one hadn’t asked Dog for much. A place to sleep, and a full plate – these things had been provided without fuss, almost as a matter of course, and Dog, who can feel his skin still crawling, pads still cracked and wind still whistling in his ears, does not have the energy to question this improbable generosity.  The large human asks for nothing, and luckily so, because Dog has nothing to give him, apart from certain very basic favors – relieving himself outdoors, for one thing, and not licking the wet papers that dangle from spiderweb strings in the house’s darkest room.  
  
Their relationship is an exercise in mutual self-sufficiency, an uncomplicated exchange.  Dog, stretched out in the sun in the center of a sparse living room, is content with this arrangement.  Humans mostly are too scatter-brained to know very much, but he and this large one have an _understanding_.     
  
                                                                                                                 ii.  
  
The smaller one, when he comes, asks for less, but needs more.  
  
Dog doesn’t need to be told this.   Only People are like that, always needing to be told, always needing to _hear_ things.  He is a Dog.  He knows.  
  
He shoves his head into the small human’s side, under his arm, nuzzles his shirt out of the way.  Mouths at his hand, a gentle and possessive chomp.  He tastes ashes somewhere on the small human’s thick skin, an invisible veil of burning dust.    
  
This one is not like the other, rooted and green and calm, broad leaves fluttering in a light breeze, smelling of dark soil.    
  
This one is a puzzle toy, a knotted creature who smells like peanut butter on the outside and wisps of smoke on the inside, hot coals smoldering somewhere deep, out of sight.  
  
  
                                                                                                                  iii.  
  
Dog trots ahead, nose low to the ground, following a meandering scent-story inscribed upon the pavement.    
  
Dry leaves skitter across the black cement, tripping over themselves in the breeze, catching up against the fringe of grass that lines either side of the park’s smooth pathway.  Dog jogs back to his People, butts Obi-Wan casually, shoves his head under an ungloved hand, twines once around Obi-Wan’s legs, then meanders away again, a long-legged satellite orbiting his two humans in a smoky autumnal ellipse, only managing to achieve a certain circumscribed distance away before curving back, in a magnetically-ordained return to center.  
  
Dog steps off the path and wanders out onto the grass, tail fanning the air.  The small human follows, ambling over to him, and Dog capers ebulliently at the accepted invitation, claws sinking into the frost-bitten ground.  Ducking away from Obi-Wan’s playful grab, Dog darts ahead, enticing Obi-Wan to give chase.  
  
The small human is sneaky; he thinks he can get a head start by jogging in the opposite direction, but that is not how it works, and Dog, giddy, loops around and paces him, his easy trot transforming into a lope, and then a gallop, until at some unspoken signal he and Obi-Wan both break out into a full-out run, the two of them streaking across the grass, tearing up a track from one side of the park to the other.    
  
The small human can’t keep up.  Dog reverses direction and leaps at him, something that is definitely Not Allowed, but Obi-Wan doesn’t protest; just topples down under the weight and hits the ground and makes a human bark, the kind Dog always has to surprise out of him, when everything smells like grass and the cool snap of autumn air.    
  
_B u g g e r,_ the small human laughs, shoving his hands ineffectually against Dog’s ribcage.    
  
Dog drags his tongue up the side of Obi-Wan’s face and doesn’t budge.  _B u g g e r_ isn’t any kind of command that he knows.  
  
  
                                                                                                                  iv.  
  
Dog paces up the short hallway, _clack clack clack_ go his nails on the wooden floor.  Paces back down.  Turns into the kitchen, turns a tight circle, again, again.    
  
The Water is empty and the Food is empty.  The House is empty.  He barks, once, in the center of the living room.  [ _absolutely_ forbidden, Not Allowed - ]  
  
He needs to go Out.  
   
He lies down in front of the door, an involuntary whine escaping his throat.    
  
He is a Dog.  He isn’t attached, they have an _understanding_ – but the understanding is that Dog will always have Food in his dish at the proper times, and the proper times are whenever Dog is hungry, and Dog is hungry _now_.    
  
Time is only light and dark, for him, time is Food in the dish and a nighttime scratch behind the ears, but it has been too dark for too long and there is no Food in the dish, no shades rattling shut, no nighttime scratch behind the ears.  He might be only a Dog, but he knows something is not right about this.

Unease pushes him to all fours again.    
  
_Clack clack_ up the hallway he goes.  
  
  
                                                                                                                  v.  
  
When the door bangs open and somebody calls the sound that means him, _D o g !_ , Dog comes running bullet-quick, squirming entirely too much to be dignified but unable to do much about it because he is _hungry_ and also he’d finally given up and made a mess, which is Bad because that is for _puppies_ but here! here at last is one of the Humans to put things right and proper again, and Dog can’t help but be a little frantic and wriggly when small human puts down Water and Food for him, the dishes filled a little too quickly, water slopping over the edge of the bowl onto the floor.  
  
The small human drops to his knees across from Dog while Dog devours the long overdue offerings. _S o r r y_ , Obi-Wan says. _S o r r y, s o r r y, i m so r r y._  
  
Dog doesn’t know that word, but it sounds purple, tender and spreading like a bruise.  He licks his lips and shoves his nose into Obi-Wan’s shirt.    
  
It seems like the thing to do.  
  
Small human waits until Dog has licked both bowls clean, then hooks two fingers under his collar.  _C o m e_ , he says, giving a gentle tug towards the door.    
  
Dog puts his ears back in alarm and pulls away.  _Come_ he knows, but this is not the Arrangement.  The large human never takes him out after eating.  After-eating is for a sunny piece of carpet and a nap, which small human ought to know.  Large human ought to have _told_ him so, if he wasn’t going to do them the basic courtesy of making an appearance.  
  
Where _is_ he, anyway?  
  
Dog whines uncomfortably, pacing in place.  Obi-Wan opens the door, and Dog can smell him then, desperate like a storm, muddy and flooded and high waters up to his helpless chin.  
  
_D o g_ , he pleads.  _C o m e._    
  
Dog, slinking and apprehensive, does.    
  
And that is the last he sees of that place.    
  
  
                                                                                                                  vi.  
  
Dog wakes whenever Obi-Wan does.  
  
Obi-Wan had given up trying to keep Dog out of his bed almost immediately.  Dog knows where he wants to sleep, and Obi-Wan is welcome to fight him over it, should he ever feel so inclined, but Dog weighs more than Obi-Wan does, and so he feels fairly well-assured of an easy victory.    
  
Dog doesn’t mean to be inconvenient, of course, but this apartment’s couch is a little thin for his heavy frame, and he certainly is not going to be bunking with the Boy.  That miniature Human is a sprawling mess who sticks his tiny heels into Dog’s sides and half the time ends up crossways or upside down in the bed. 

Dog might be a Dog, but he has standards.  
  
Obi-Wan is by far a better bedfellow.  Unlike the puppy-sized newcomer they have both been saddled with, Obi-Wan never stirs, even upon waking.  The only sign that his state of awareness has undergone any change at all is his shallower breathing, the carefully controlled quality to his exhalations, the glow of heat kindling around his tense form, old coals in his stomach burning red-hot again.    
  
He wakes too often, in Dog’s opinion, for a Human who never takes naps the way Dogs do.  
  
Dog rolls over and buries his massive head in Obi-Wan’s arms.  No matter.  No wonder.  Small human is burning up on the inside; of course he is awake. 

Dog doesn’t mind the interruptions.  
  
This is a new kind of Arrangement they are making here.  
  
  
                                                                                                                  vii.  
  
By the time the tiny human is not so tiny anymore, Dog knows some words.  
  
_Couch,_ for instance.    
  
_Couch_ is for sitting, but sometimes where they lie, asleep.  
  
_Bed_ is for sleeping, but sometimes where they sit, awake.  
  
Peanut Butter is for _delicious_.  
  
_No_ is for Peanut Butter when it is on two pieces of Bread in Obi-Wan’s hand.  
  
_Bird_ is for chases and races and panting and a lolling tongue, and feathers fluttering down out of the air.  
  
_Off_ is for when Obi-Wan pretends he doesn’t want to wrestle.  
  
_Smile!_ is what the Girl says, before a white light explodes in front of Dog’s perpetually unprepared eyes.  
  
_Anakin_ is for the Boy, who belongs to Obi-Wan.  
  
_Obi-Wan_ is for the small human, who belongs to Dog.  
  
  
                                                                                                                viii.  
  
The humans make more words than just the ones Dog knows, of course.    
  
Mostly, their noises are the shapes of sounds and the smells of feelings, which, for Dog, is generally more than a sufficient basis for comprehension.  This is especially true when it comes to Obi-Wan, whose noises have a taste to them, and whose words have a place to them, everything easy to understand in its proper context, everything as purely simple and clearly delineated as _G o o d  D o g -_ which is only for quiet voices and murmuring, for alone-time; which tastes like the single illicit chocolate chip Dog had once snapped up from the kitchen floor, and which feels like drowsing in a square of sunlight. _G o o d  d o g,_ Obi-Wan murmuring, just the two of them awake in the middle of the night. _G o o d  d o g_   whispered when only Dog can hear, _g o o d  do g_   in the dark, _g o o d  d o g_   when Obi-Wan scrunches his eyes closed, _g o o d  d o g_   when a hand drifts up to rest behind Dog’s ears, _g o o d  d o g_   forehead to forehead, under the covers, under the shadows, under the weather, under a fathomless flooding sea.  
  
  
                                                                                                                  ix.  
  
Obi-Wan’s silences have smells.    
  
Once, before, they had gone somewhere in the Car, and Dog doesn’t really know a word for where they had been because everywhere that isn’t home or the old House is just Somewhere Else, but this had been somewhere grey and cool, vast and open and overshadowed by a looming, cloud-matted sky.  Dog had rolled in the Sand four times and dug three Holes and chased seventeen different Birds, big white ones that had whooped at him as they’d climbed away into the air.  There had been water, great foaming walls of iron grey water that Dog had barreled into up to his chest before yelping and scrambling back out again, not because it had been cold (it had been) but because it had stung his nose and burned his throat and pricked at his eyes in a way he hadn’t appreciated.  
  
Obi-Wan’s silences smell that way sometimes.  Like salt.  
  
  
                                                                                                                  x.  
  
The other ones, the Boy and the Girl, don’t know how to take care of small human properly.  
  
Dog accepts their incompetence with equanimity, though it strikes him as preposterous that any species should be capable of not knowing how to care for its own.  He tolerates the Boy and the Girl's ridiculous displays of ignorance only because they are younger Dogs still, and meant to learn from his more practiced example.  
  
That isn’t to say he doesn’t like the two of them.  The Girl has good fingers for ear-scritching and neck-scratching, in the bare spot where his hair had never grown back after those people had changed his ears.  And the Boy drops crumbs of Food behind him wherever he goes, and is good for playing with the Ball and wrestling and running up and down the Park.  Once, the Boy had even been little enough to curl up in the puppy space along the curve of Dog’s abdomen, and although Boy is taller now than small human had ever been, all those curled-up nesting naps of yesteryear ought to count for something.  
  
The Boy and the Girl are his People.  They are worthy, and they are Good - and yet neither of them have any clue what they are doing.

They are both squinting-bright, and they smell sharp, and they make so much noise, clamor that is not like Obi-Wan’s sounds, the Girl’s voice clear and strong like splitting stone, and the Boy’s like crackling flames, both of them bursting in firework tandem trails all over the house.  So dynamic.  So dramatic.  Nothing with them ever still.  Obi-Wan disappears behind their shower of shards and sparks, and when they try to _take care_ it is in their clumsy People way, the one that makes Dog whuffle to himself in consternation, perplexed at how any of them ever manage to get anything done.  They have no common sense.  No Human ever really does, but these two – they are brilliant stars, with their stone-breaking and flash-burning, and they smell like electric life and pulsing hearts, but their version of _taking care_ means trying to set Obi-Wan alight, or chip him open, and they do not smell what Dog smells, that this small human is all Salt on his insides; they do not understand what any sensible animal instinctively knows – that Salt doesn’t need burning or chipping away; it just needs time to be absorbed.  
  
Dog knows.  Dog licks it away from Obi-Wan’s face, lies against Obi-Wan’s bare back and sweats it out of him, furnace-hot under the covers, waiting for the fever to pass.  Obi-Wan tastes bitter like the sea and that is all right; Dog likes the ocean just fine.  The ocean has more in it than anyone can hope to fully understand, and if Salt is what all those uncountable things push out of it, then that is just the way things are.  No one, not even a Dog, can _do_ anything to the ocean.  He can only be near it.  
  
Small human is an ocean unto himself.  Dog, in this world of uncomplicated exchanges and unspoken understandings, knows that ' _being near'_ is a simple enough Arrangement for both of them. 

He settles in next to his small human, and waits for the tide to go out.


End file.
